“If one of them men,” said Patsy solemnly, “had the spunk of a wandering goat or a mangy dog he’d have taken a graipe to yourself, mister, and he’d have picked your soul out of your body and slung it on a dung heap.”
“Don’t be thinking,” replied the other, “that men are courageous and fiery animals, for they’re not, and every person that pays wages to men knows well that they’re as timid as sheep and twice as timid. Let me tell you too that all the trouble wasn’t on their side; I had a share of it and a big share.”
Mac Cann interrupted solemnly—
“That’s what the fox told the goose when the goose said that the teeth hurted him. ‘Look at the trouble I had to catch you,’ said the fox.”
“We won’t mind that,” said Billy the Music.
“I was hard put to it to make the money. I was able to knock a good profit out of the land and the beasts and the men that worked for me; and then, when I came to turn the profit into solid pieces, I found that there was a world outside of my world, and it was truly bent on robbing me, and, what’s more, it had thought hard for generations about the best way of doing it. It had made its scheme so carefully that I was as helpless among them people as the labourers were with me. Oh! they got me, and they squeezed me, and they marched off smiling with the heaviest part of my gain, and they told me to be a bit more polite or they’d break me into bits, and I was polite too. Ah! there’s a big world outside the little world, and maybe there’s a bigger world outside that, and grindstones in it for all the people that are squeezers in their own place.
“The price I thought fair for the crop was never the price I got from the jobbers. If I sold a cow or a horse I never got as much as half of what I reckoned on. There were rings and cliques in the markets everywhere, and they knew how to manage me. It was they who got more than half the money I made, and they had me gripped so that I couldn’t get away. It was for these people I used to be out of bed at twelve o’clock at night and up again before the fowl were done snoring, and it was for them I tore the bowels out of my land, and hazed and bedevilled every man and woman and dog that came in sight of me, and when I thought of these marketmen with their red jowls and their ‘take it or leave it’ I used to get so full of rage that I could hardly breathe.
“I had to take it because I couldn’t afford to leave it, and then I’d go home again trying to cut it finer, trying to skin an extra chance profit off the land and workers, and I do wonder now that the men didn’t try to kill me or didn’t commit suicide. Aye, I wonder that I didn’t commit suicide myself by dint of the rage and greed and weariness that was my share of life day and night.
“I got the money anyhow, and, sure enough, the people must have thought I was the devil’s self; but it was little I cared what they thought, for the pieces were beginning to mount up in the box, and one fine day the box got so full that not another penny piece could have been squeezed sideways into it, so I had to make a new box, and it wasn’t so long until I made a third box and a fourth one, and I could see the time coming when I would be able to stand in with the marketmen, and get a good grip on whatever might be going.”
“How much did you rob in all?” said Patsy.
“I had all of two thousand pounds.”
“That’s a lot of money, I’m thinking.”
“It is so, and it took a lot of getting, and there was twenty damns went into the box with every one of the yellow pieces.”
“A damn isn’t worth a shilling,” said Patsy. “You can have them from me at two for a ha’penny, and there’s lots of people would give them to yourself for nothing, you rotten old robber of the world! And if I had the lump of twist back that I gave you a couple of minutes ago I’d put it in my pocket, so I would, and I’d sit on it.”
“Don’t forget that you’re talking about old things,” said Billy the Music.
“If I was one of your men,” shouted Patsy, “you wouldn’t have treated me that way.”
Billy the Music smiled happily at him.
“Wouldn’t I?” said he, with his head on one side.
“You would not,” said Patsy, “for I’d have broken your skull with a spade.”
“If you had been one of my men,” the other replied mildly, “you’d have been as tame as a little kitten; you’d have crawled round me with your hat in your hand and your eyes turned up like a dying duck’s, and you’d have said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘No, sir,’ like the other men that I welted the stuffing out of with my two fists, and broke the spirits of with labour and hunger. Don’t be talking now, for you’re an ignorant man in these things, although you did manage to steal a clocking hen off me the day I was busy.”
“And a pair of good boots,” said Patsy triumphantly.
“Do you want to hear the rest of the story?”
“I do so,” said Patsy; “and I take back what I said about the tobacco; here’s another bit of it for your pipe.”
“Thank you kindly,” replied Billy.
He shook the ashes from his pipe, filled it, and continued his tale.
“On the head of all these things a wonderful thing happened to me.”
“That’s the way to start,”
